COVID-19: Russia struggling with the outbreak – reports almost 10,000 new cases of coronavirus

Russia reported 9,623 new coronavirus cases – its highest daily rise since the start of the pandemic – bringing the total to 124,054, mostly in the capital Moscow. The death toll nationwide rose to 1,222 after 57 people died in the last 24 hours, Russia’s coronavirus crisis response centre said on Saturday. Concern was growing in Moscow that hospitals might become overwhelmed after recording the new one-day high of infections, a 20 percent increase over Friday’s count, which itself was a new daily record.

Despite lockdown measures, infection numbers have been rising at an alarming rate for days in the world’s largest country by area. Moscow is the worst-affected part of Russia, accounting for about 62,600 cases, about half of the nationwide total. People there who have not obtained a special permit for free movement are only able to leave their homes to shop, walk their dogs, and dispose of rubbish. President Vladimir Putin has ordered the restrictive measures, called non-working days, to continue until May 11 when the country finishes celebrating the Labour Day and Victory Day holidays.

Despite a relatively low number of cases and deaths compared with the United States, Italy and Spain, which have been hit hardest by the disease, Russia’s infection curve has not reached a plateau. Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin warned the Russian capital was not yet past the peak of the outbreak. “The threat is apparently on the rise,” Sobyanin said in his blog, adding that 2 percent of the Moscowvite population – or more than 250,000 people – is believed to have contracted the virus.  “According to screening tests of various population groups, the real number of the infected is around two percent of Moscow’s total population,” Sobyanin said.

Sobyanin told Rossiya-1 TV station that, should the situation worsen, authorities may cut the number of digital permits issued for travel across the city. He said Moscow had significantly ramped up testing capacity, adding that the city has managed to “contain the spread of the infection” with the enforcement of stay-at-home rules and other measures. Moscow’s mayor said this week officials are considering establishing temporary hospitals at sports complexes and shopping malls to deal with the influx of patients.  Infection cases have reached the highest levels of government. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, the second-most senior official in the country after Putin, told the president on Thursday that he tested positive for coronavirus and was temporarily stepping down to recover. First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov is now serving as acting prime minister in his absence. On Friday, May 1, 2020, another member of the Russian cabinet, Construction Minister Vladimir Yakushev, announced he was diagnosed with the virus and would be treated in hospital. Dmitry Volkov, one of his deputies, also tested positive, the ministry said.  –Al Jazeera

Moderate earthquakes strike Puerto Rico and the Greek island of Crete

A 5.5-magnitude earthquake hit near southern Puerto Rico on Saturday, shortly before another quake struck the Mediterranean Sea south of the Greek island of Crete. The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake near southern Puerto Rico hit just off the coast of towns including Guánica and Guayanilla, where hundreds of homes were destroyed by a quake in early January that killed one person and caused millions of dollars in damage. The quake jolted many from their beds but there were no immediate reports of casualties.

Reports of damage were trickling in. At least one second-story balcony crashed in the southern city of Ponce, spokeswoman Inés Rivera told The Associated Press. Cracks in homes were reported in Guayanilla.  “Everything shook really hard,” spokesman Danny Hernández said by phone. Guánica Mayor Santos Seda told the AP that no major damage was immediately reported – though some building sustained damage. “Thank God everyone is OK,” he said. “The infrastructure is already weak.”

Meanwhile, no damage or injuries were immediately reported from the magnitude 6.0 earthquake near Crete. The Athens Geodynamic Institute said that quake occurred Saturday at 3:51 p.m. local time and was centered 63 kilometers – 39 miles – away from the coastal town of Ierapetra at a depth of 15 kilometers – 9 miles. The European Mediterranean Seismological Centre said there were reports the quake was felt in Egypt.  Greece is located in a highly seismically active area and experiences hundreds of quakes each year. Saturday’s quake was stronger than most but took place relatively far from populated areas.

New report says pandemic could last for two years – and may not subside until 70% of the population has immunity

As coronavirus restrictions around the world are being lifted, a new report warns the pandemic that has already killed more than 230,000 people likely won’t be contained for two years. The modeling study from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota also says that about 70% of people need to be immune in order to bring the virus to a halt. For the study, experts looked at eight major influenza pandemics dating back to the 1700s, as well as data about the new coronavirus, to help forecast how COVID-19 may spread over the coming months and years. Out of the eight past flu pandemics, scientists said seven had a second substantial peak about six months after the first one. Additionally, some had “smaller waves of cases over the course of 2 years” after the initial outbreak. 

“A key factor in their prediction for the current pandemic revolves around herd immunity, which refers to the community-wide resistance to the spread of a contagious disease that results when a high percentage of people are immune to it, either through vaccination or prior exposure. The length of the pandemic will likely be 18 to 24 months, as herd immunity gradually develops in the human population,” the report says. “Given the transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2” — the virus that causes COVID-19 — “60% to 70% of the population may need to be immune to reach a critical threshold of herd immunity to halt the pandemic.” It will take time to reach that point, since data from blood tests show only a small fraction of the overall population has been infected so far, and a possible vaccine is still months if not a year or more away. It is not yet clear whether people who’ve recovered from the infection will be immune or how long such protection would last.

The report lays out several possible scenarios, including one in which a larger wave of illnesses may happen in the fall or winter of 2020 and then subsequent smaller waves in 2021. The researchers say this model — similar to the pattern seen in the devastating 1918 Spanish flu pandemic — would “require the reinstitution of mitigation measures in the fall in an attempt to drive down spread of infection and prevent healthcare systems from being overwhelmed.” Two other scenarios in the report involve either recurring peaks and valleys of outbreaks, or smaller waves of illness over the next two years.   –CBS News

Protesters in at least 10 states demand end to coronavirus lock down – anger going viral

Demonstrators in at least 10 states across the country gathered on Friday to protest against stay-at-home orders and other emergency measures meant to blunt the coronavirus’s spread. The protests underscored how antsy some are getting to return to a sense of normalcy after the coronavirus, which has infected nearly 1.1 million people in America, shuttered businesses across an array of industries and pushed more than 30 million Americans into unemployment. Though some demonstrations were lightly attended, demonstrations occurred in state capitols and cities in California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Tennessee and Washington. Demonstrators in at least 10 states across the country gathered on Friday to protest against stay-at-home orders and other emergency measures meant to blunt the coronavirus’s spread.

 The protests underscored how antsy some are getting to return to a sense of normalcy after the coronavirus, which has infected nearly 1.1 million people in America, shuttered businesses across an array of industries and pushed more than 30 million Americans into unemployment. Though some demonstrations were lightly attended, demonstrations occurred in state capitols and cities in California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Tennessee and Washington. Several protesters told local media that shutdown orders were imposing too great an economic burden after pushing many small businesses to shutter. “Businesses are suffering, unemployment checks are not being sent, landlords are not getting rent. We feel like these directives are causing more suffering than is necessary,” New Jersey protester Ayla Wolf told NJ.com.

 Protesters were seen waving signs accusing their governors of trying to “ruin” their states and warning of “tyranny.” Yet despite the protests, several governors have said their decisions on when and how to reopen their states will be determined based on progress in the fight against the coronavirus and not be political. “I get the arguments,” said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D). “This is not a political decision.” The demonstrators have gotten a boost of support in recent days as President Trump has voiced his backing for several of the protesters, tweeting Friday morning that those demonstrating in Michigan are “very good people, but they are angry.”  –The Hill

Oklahoma City repeals mask requirement after customers threaten store employees

Officials in Stillwater, Okla., on Friday walked back a requirement that people wear face masks inside reopened stores and restaurants, citing threats of violence and physical abuse directed at employees. Mayor Will Joyce, an independent, amended his emergency declaration on the same day it took effect “in response to concerns voiced by business proprietors and citizens,” according to a news release. The anger directed toward store employees started in the first three hours businesses were open and included a threat of gun violence.

Caution the new normal: According to a recent poll, 1 in 6 people said they wouldn’t feel comfortable being in a crowded public setting again despite an end to lock-downs. Life will never fully return to normal until we have a vaccine or COVID-19 is no longer a prevalent public health threat.

State and local governments have included a requirement that people wear masks in at least some circumstances as part of their reopening plans. In Stillwater, many people objecting to the mask requirement cited their belief that the rule is unconstitutional, City Manager Norman McNickle said in the news release and first reported by the Stillwater News Press. McNickle noted that a federal court in Oklahoma City dismissed a lawsuit challenging the city of Guthrie’s mask requirement. The judge ruled the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue but did not rule on the constitutionality of the mask requirement, court records show.

McNickle said wearing a mask is a minor inconvenience that protects the person wearing it and anyone they encounter. “The City of Stillwater has attempted to keep people safe by the simple requirement to wear a face covering to protect others,” McNickle wrote. “It is unfortunate and distressing that those who refuse and threaten violence are so self-absorbed as to not follow what is a simple show of respect and kindness to others.” McNickle said officials could not, in good conscience, put store and restaurant employees in danger. Stillwater’s stores are asked to at least encourage customers to wear masks, and specific businesses can choose to have more restrictive requirements.  –Washington Post

Part I: Tracking the ‘Murder Hornet’ – a deadly insect pest has reached North America

LAINE, Wash. — In his decades of beekeeping, Ted McFall had never seen anything like it. As he pulled his truck up to check on a group of hives near Custer, Wash., in November, he could spot from the window a mess of bee carcasses on the ground. As he looked closer, he saw a pile of dead members of the colony in front of a hive and more carnage inside — thousands and thousands of bees with their heads torn from their bodies and no sign of a culprit. “I couldn’t wrap my head around what could have done that,” Mr. McFall said. Only later did he come to suspect that the killer was what some researchers simply call the “murder hornet.”

With queens that can grow to two inches long, Asian giant hornets can use mandibles shaped like spiked shark fins to wipe out a honeybee hive in a matter of hours, decapitating the bees and flying away with the thoraxes to feed their young. For larger targets, the hornet’s potent venom and stinger — long enough to puncture a beekeeping suit — make for an excruciating combination that victims have likened to hot metal driving into their skin. In Japan, the hornets kill up to 50 people a year. Now, for the first time, they have arrived in the United States. Mr. McFall still is not certain that Asian giant hornets were responsible for the plunder of his hive. But two of the predatory insects were discovered last fall in the northwest corner of Washington State, a few miles north of his property — the first sightings in the United States.

Scientists have since embarked on a full-scale hunt for the hornets, worried that the invaders could decimate bee populations in the United States and establish such a deep presence that all hope for eradication could be lost. “This is our window to keep it from establishing,” said Chris Looney, an entomologist at the Washington State Department of Agriculture. “If we can’t do it in the next couple of years, it probably can’t be done.” On a cold morning in early December, two and a half miles to the north of Mr. McFall’s property, Jeff Kornelis stepped on his front porch with his terrier-mix dog. He looked down to a jarring sight: “It was the biggest hornet I’d ever seen.”

The insect was dead, and after inspecting it, Mr. Kornelis had a hunch that it might be an Asian giant hornet. It did not make much sense, given his location in the world, but he had seen an episode of the YouTube personality Coyote Peterson getting a brutal sting from one of the hornets. Beyond its size, the hornet has a distinctive look, with a cartoonishly fierce face featuring teardrop eyes like Spider-Man, orange and black stripes that extend down its body like a tiger, and broad, wispy wings like a small dragonfly. Mr. Kornelis contacted the state, which came out to confirm that it was indeed an Asian giant hornet. Soon after, they learned that a local beekeeper in the area had also found one of the hornets.  –DNYUZ

Part II: Tracking the ‘Murder Hornet’ – a deadly insect pest has reached North America

The insect was dead, and after inspecting it, Mr. Kornelis had a hunch that it might be an Asian giant hornet. It did not make much sense, given his location in the world, but he had seen an episode of the YouTube personality Coyote Peterson getting a brutal sting from one of the hornets. Beyond its size, the hornet has a distinctive look, with a cartoonishly fierce face featuring teardrop eyes like Spider-Man, orange and black stripes that extend down its body like a tiger, and broad, wispy wings like a small dragonfly. Mr. Kornelis contacted the state, which came out to confirm that it was indeed an Asian giant hornet. Soon after, they learned that a local beekeeper in the area had also found one of the hornets.

Mr. Looney said it was immediately clear that the state faced a serious problem, but with only two insects in hand and winter coming on, it was nearly impossible to determine how much the hornet had already made itself at home. Over the winter, state agriculture biologists and local beekeepers got to work, preparing for the coming season. Ruthie Danielsen, a beekeeper who has helped organize her peers to combat the hornet, unfurled a map across the hood of her vehicle, noting the places across Whatcom County where beekeepers have placed traps.

Asian Giant Hornets – in China – Filed October 3, 2013

“Most people are scared to get stung by them,” Ms. Danielsen said. “We’re scared that they are going to totally destroy our hives.” Adding to the uncertainty — and mystery — were some other discoveries of the Asian giant hornet across the border in Canada. In November, a single hornet was seen in White Rock, British Columbia, perhaps 10 miles away from the discoveries in Washington State — likely too far for the hornets to be part of the same colony. Even earlier, there had been a hive discovered on Vancouver Island, across a strait that probably was too wide for a hornet to have crossed from the mainland.

“It was like having red-hot thumbtacks being driven into my flesh,” he said. He ended up getting stung at least seven times, some of the stings drawing blood. Jun-ichi Takahashi, a researcher at Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan, said the species had earned the “murder hornet” nickname there because its aggressive group attacks can expose victims to doses of toxic venom equivalent to that of a venomous snake; a series of stings can be fatal. The night he got stung, Mr. Bérubé still managed to eliminate the nest and collect samples, but the next day, his legs were aching, as if he had the flu. Of the thousands of times he has been stung in his lifetime of work, he said, the Asian giant hornet stings were the most painful.  –DNYUZ

Recovered patients haunted by horrid COVID-19 experiences – only for some to fall ill with the disease again

It had been over a month since Mirabai Nicholson-McKellar was infected with the coronavirus, and the 35-year-old filmmaker thought she was on her way to recovery. Then the shortness of breath came back, followed by chest pains. A visit to the emergency room and a second test for COVID-19 gave another positive result. Just three days earlier, she’d been cleared by health authorities in Australia’s New South Wales state, and was allowed to end her home quarantine after going 72 hours without symptoms.

CNN Anchor Brooke Baldwin shares her experience about contracting COVID-19

“When is this going to end? I think about that constantly,” she said of the twists and turns in her health. “Am I still contagious? How do I know if I’m not contagious?” Her experience adds to a growing number of reports of patients appearing to have a reactivation of symptoms, testing positive again, or even potentially being re-infected. Such incidents don’t align with the generally accepted understanding of how virus infections work and spread.

A false dawn is a promising situation that comes to naught. Some COVID-19 recoveries are being called that. This so-called false-dawn phenomenon is puzzling health experts as they try to come to grips with the mysterious pathogen that emerged only five months ago. Solving the puzzle will inform a broad range of challenges, from the development of an effective vaccine to how soon governments may be able to safely end lock-downs and allow normal life to resume. More immediately, the situation is taking a personal toll, making the journey of recovery a complex and frustrating ordeal for some of the more than 1 million survivors of the pandemic.

So far, there hasn’t been enough research to conclude why symptoms seem to re-emerge in some people, and whether they experience reinfection or if the virus persists for weeks. One possibility is that COVID-19 causes blood clots that may cause potentially dangerous complications unless treated with anticoagulant medications, said Edwin J.R. van Beek, chair of clinical radiology at the University of Edinburgh’s Queens Medical Research Institute. South Korean researchers also offered some clues this week when they reported that so-called nucleic acid tests might be positive based on the detection of dead viral particles that could give the false impression that a patient is still infectious when they’re not.

“Everyone’s trying to figure this out,” said Yvonne Maldonado, an infectious diseases professor at Stanford Medical School. “What happens when people have been sick and infected — are we going to consider them immune and, therefore, not susceptible at all? Or are they immune and serve as potential points of infection for other people?” Officials in countries that managed to suppress an initial wave of the pandemic are dreading the possibility that the virus may have a seasonal pattern and could return in the fall and repeat the nightmare scenario.  –MSN

Coronavirus could cause an economic collapse worse than the Great Depression – world disintegrating before our eyes

World in Chaos: Excessive taxation caused massive protests in Boston, which led to the American Revolution. The Storming of the Bastille in France led to the French Revolution.  COVID-19 may be the next tipping point for global anarchy and revolution.

Economic forecasts that already suggest the coronavirus pandemic will cause the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression might be too optimistic, according to the head of the International Monetary Fund. “Yes, it can get worse,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said Monday. “It can get worse if, during the second half of the year, there is still significant lingering impact of the pandemic that forces either a return to the lockdown, to the Great Lock-down, or a very slow reopening of the economies. It can get even worse if the pandemic goes on a second round-the-world trip.”

Georgieva’s team has projected a “cumulative loss” of roughly $9 trillion around the world, as scores of countries, lacking testing capabilities to identify infected patients, have adopted aggressive social distancing tactics to slow the spread of the contagion. Yet, the unpredictability of the coronavirus complicates both those calculations and the decision-making process for governments. “We just don’t know what is going to happen next,” Georgieva emphasized during the Atlantic Council event. “We don’t know whether the virus will make two rounds around the world. We don’t know whether vaccine and treatment will become available sooner rather than later. And, for policymakers, this uncertainty is very difficult to handle, but it is also very difficult for people.”

Those economic risks, over the long-term, are exacerbated by the surge in government spending that has occurred as national leaders try to support people whose livelihoods have been threatened by the social distancing strategy. Some analysts fear the spending could trigger a wave of debt crises, but Georgieva urged an aggressive approach in the short term. “Very clearly, the world is building up much more debt,” she said. “It has to be done … do as much as you can, and then do a little bit more, because this is the only way for us to go through the first stage of this crisis.”  –Washington Examiner

Joker’s Revolution: This is class warfare on another level – In particular, COVID-19 exacerbates preexisting conditions of inequality wherever it arrives. Before long, this will cause social turmoil, up to and including uprisings and revolutions. Social unrest had already been increasing around the world before SARS-CoV-2 began its journey. According to one count, there have been about 100 large anti-government protests since 2017, from the gilets jaunes riots in a rich country like France to demonstrations against strongmen in poor countries such as Sudan and Bolivia. About 20 of these uprisings toppled leaders, while several were suppressed by brutal crackdowns and many others went back to simmering until the next outbreak.

And so it goes, wherever SARS-CoV-2 shows up. The International Labor Organization has warned that it will destroy 195 million jobs worldwide, and drastically cut the income of another 1.25 billion people. Most of them were already poor. As their suffering worsens, so do other scourges, from alcoholism and drug addiction to domestic violence and child abuse, leaving whole populations traumatized, perhaps permanently.

In this context, it would be naive to think that, once this medical emergency is over, either individual countries or the world can carry on as before. Anger and bitterness will find new outlets. Early harbingers include millions of Brazilians banging pots and pans from their windows to protest against their government, or Lebanese prisoners rioting in their overcrowded jails. –Bloomberg

If a vaccine or low-cost effective treatments are not found for the COVID-19 virus, the economic and psychological impacts on our societal structures will be too great to bear. Nation states will begin to disintegrate. Crime, revolution, and anarchy will become the order of the day as countries run out of money, food, and hope. We are living on a knife’s edge while staring chaos in the face and it is not wearing a surgical mask.